Cloud-based virtualization techniques have greatly improved the speed and agility in application development and deployment of services. A common form of cloud-based virtualization platform includes a virtual machine. A virtual machine may be generally characterized as a server virtualization platform, in which a virtual machine with its own unique operating system and dedicated kernel is designed to emulate a particular hardware system on top of the physical server. A single physical server infrastructure may service multiple virtual machines emulating different hardware systems, thus enabling the deployment of different applications on a single server. Another particular form of a cloud-based virtualization platform or deployment infrastructure is referred to as containerization. Containerization, also called container-based virtualization or application containerization, is an operating system (OS) level virtualization method for deploying and running distributed applications. Instead of spinning up a virtual machine emulating a particular hardware environment, multiple isolated systems, called containers, are run on a single control host operating system and access a single kernel. Because containers do not have the overhead required by a virtual machine, such as a separate, dedicated OS instance, it is possible to support many more containers on the same infrastructure. Thus, containerization can improve performance because a single OS may be operating to handle the numerous hardware calls for the containerized platform.
Software-based applications generally require a secret, such as a password, key, credential, token, or certificate to access controlled assets in an enterprise or organization. The required secret is generally used to authenticate the application against other spurious or unknown applications attempting to access enterprise resources. Some known techniques today provide an application with a predetermined, initial secret for validating the application. This predetermined secret may be hard-coded into the application itself. Such hard-coded, predetermined secrets, however, may be easily discovered and, if obtained by a malicious actor, could be used by a spurious application to launch an attack on an enterprise. These same techniques have been applied in cloud-based application deployment. But the risk is magnified in distributed cloud platforms where an application may be replicated numerous times among many distributed virtualization platforms thereby increasing the exposure of the predetermined secret, and making it more susceptible to discovery. Furthermore, because the predetermined secret may be shared among the many distributed applications, a compromised secret may be used to inflict a more widespread attack. For example, due to the shared access to a single host OS by the many different container instances in a containerized platform, a single security threat may pose a greater risk to an entire system.
Other techniques for authenticating an application include querying the operating system running the application to verify the application's authenticity. But in a virtualized platform environment, this technique is not feasible. For example, a containerized application runs as an isolated process in a user space on the shared host OS, and in a virtual machine environment, the VM's dedicated OS is isolated from the host OS. Thus, it may not be feasible to query the host OS of the server infrastructure to obtain information for authenticating the application running in the virtualization platform (e.g., the container or Virtual Machine). In other words, it is not an easy and feasible task to isolate the required information for authenticating an application instance running in cloud-based virtualization platforms.
Thus, there is a need for technological solutions for securing a virtual system environment with capabilities for validating virtual instances that do not rely on predetermined authentication data associated with an application. A technological solution is needed for providing only those authorized instances with a credential or security token that may be required to authenticate requests from the application for accessing one or more target assets or services. Such a solution is needed to protect virtualized platform environments from malicious and/or unauthorized virtualized applications accessing a compromised predetermined secret and using such a secret for accessing target assets and services.